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Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Why Google Is Sending Its Smartphones Into Space?

As reported by Business Week: Google (GOOG) and
NASA are developing smart robots designed to fly around the
International Space Station and eventually take over some menial tasks
from astronauts with the aid of custom-built smartphones.Since
2006, three colorful, volleyball-sized robots have been slowly floating
around a 10-foot by 10-foot by 10-foot space inside the ISS. Scientists
used them for research projects such as a study on the movement of
liquids inside containers in microgravity environments.NASA now
plans to attach smartphones to the flying robots to give them spatial
awareness that would enable them to travel throughout the space station.
The Android-based phones will track the 3D motion of the robotic
spheres while mapping their surroundings. “Our goal is to advance the
state of 3D sensing for mobile devices in an effort to give mobile
devices human-scale sense of space and motion,” says Johnny Chung Lee, a
technical program lead at Google.

Before the phones are attached to the robots, a human will
carry each phone around the station so that the mobile device can create
a full 3D model of the facility. The robots should be able to navigate
autonomously 230 miles above Earth. Within a few years, the project’s
leaders say, such robots could shoot video from inside the station,
conduct regular sound surveys, and take inventory of the tools on board.“Inventory
management is a huge problem at the ISS,” says Chris Provencher, a
project manager for Smart Spheres at NASA’s Ames Research Center in
Moffett Field, Calif. “Think of something that’s the size of a house and
has thousands of tools, and they are spread all over the house—and
every few months, you get a new family that has to figure out where
everything is.”It took a lot of tinkering to get Google’s
spatially aware phones working in space, Provencher says. The phones’
gravity-vector algorithms had to be removed from the software, and the
devices had to be adjusted to accommodate the robots’ slow speeds, which
top out at about a foot per second.

NASA began investigating the use of sensors mounted on the
robotic spheres three years ago, and researchers quickly realized that
smartphones with cameras and accelerometers could provide a cheap
alternative to custom-built hardware. At first, astronauts velcroed a
Google Nexus S smartphone to a sphere
and collected data from the phone’s gyroscope to show how the robotic
sphere moves differently in orbit than on Earth. NASA was also able to operate the spheres remotely, from the ground.

“You
can imagine, in the future, if you had a free flyer capable of flying
outside, you could have crew control it from the inside,” Provencher
says. “If the crew has to go out there eventually to do work, this can
at least reduce the amount of time they have to spend outside. They can
review the damage.”The new phones are scheduled for launch into
space on June 10. Google says the technology may also have applications
on earth, such as in gaming and navigation assistance
for the visually-impaired. “This is one step on the journey to making
these algorithms more robust, more sophisticated, and to make them
available to a large number of people,” says Lee.

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About Me

I have more than 25 years of experience in development, design, and mobile communications products and technology. I also enjoy skiing, hiking, scuba, tennis, reading, traveling, foreign languages, and painting. I'm an active member of the National Ski Patrol (NSP) and volunteer my time at either Loveland Ski resort, or Ski Cooper.